Product Description

This book is a practical guide to discovering and exploiting security flaws in web applications. The authors explain each category of vulnerability using real–world examples, screen shots and code extracts. The book is extremely practical in focus, and describes in detail the steps involved in detecting and exploiting each kind of security weakness found within a variety of applications such as online banking, e–commerce and other web applications.

The topics covered include bypassing login mechanisms, injecting code, exploiting logic flaws and compromising other users. Because every web application is different, attacking them entails bringing to bear various general principles, techniques and experience in an imaginative way. The most successful hackers go beyond this, and find ways to automate their bespoke attacks. This handbook describes a proven methodology that combines the virtues of human intelligence and computerized brute force, often with devastating results.

The authors are professional penetration testers who have been involved in web application security for nearly a decade. They have presented training courses at the Black Hat security conferences throughout the world. Under the alias "PortSwigger", Dafydd developed the popular Burp Suite of web application hack tools.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14647 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 768 pages

From the Back Cover
Hack the planet

Web applications are everywhere, and they′re insecure. Banks, retailers, and others have deployed millions of applications that are full of holes, allowing attackers to steal personal data, carry out fraud, and compromise other systems. This innovative book shows you how they do it.

This is hands–on stuff. The authors, recognized experts in security testing, take a practical approach, showing you the detailed steps involved in finding and exploiting security flaws in web applications. You will learn to:

• Defeat an application′s core defense mechanisms and gain unauthorized access, even to the most apparently secure applications

• Map attack surfaces and recognize potential entry points

• Break client–side controls implemented within HTML, Java®, ActiveX®, and Flash®

• Uncover subtle logic flaws that leave applications exposed

• Use automation to speed up your attacks, with devastating results

• Delve into source code and spot common vulnerabilities in languages like C#, Java, and PHP

Know your enemy

To defend an application, you must first know its weaknesses. If you design or maintain web applications, this book will arm you with the protective measures you need to prevent all of the attacks described. If you′re a developer, it will show you exactly where and how to strengthen your defenses.

Additional resources online at www.wiley.com/go/webhacker

• Source code for scripts in this book

• Links to tools and resources

• Checklist of tasks involved in attacking applications

• Answers to the questions posed in each chapter

• A hacking challenge prepared by the authors

About the Author
Dafydd Stuttard is a Principal Security Consultant at Next Generation Security Software, where he leads the web application security competency. He has nine years’ experience in security consulting and specializes in the penetration testing of web applications and compiled software.
Dafydd has worked with numerous banks, retailers, and other enterprises to help secure their web applications, and has provided security consulting to several software manufacturers and governments to help secure their compiled software. Dafydd is an accomplished programmer in several languages, and his interests include developing tools to facilitate all kinds of software security testing.
Dafydd has developed and presented training courses at the Black Hat security conferences around the world. Under the alias “PortSwigger,” Dafydd created the popular Burp Suite of web application hacking tools. Dafydd holds master’s and doctorate degrees in philosophy from the University of Oxford.

Marcus Pinto is a Principal Security Consultant at Next Generation Security Software, where he leads the database competency development team, and has lead the development of NGS’ primary training courses. He has eight years’ experience in security consulting and specializes in penetration testing of web applications and supporting architectures.
Marcus has worked with numerous banks, retailers, and other enterprises to help secure their web applications, and has provided security consulting to the development projects of several security–critical applications. He has worked extensively with large–scale web application deployments in the financial services industry.
Marcus has developed and presented database and web application training courses at the Black Hat and other security conferences around the world. Marcus holds a master’s degree in physics from the University of Cambridge.

Customer Reviews

The Best Web Application Security Book To Date
The Web Application Hackers Handbook continues the tradition of the other books in the "Hackers Handbook" series in being specifically written for people who are serious about testing and protecting the security of their network and applications.
As a full time Application tester most of the books I've read have been of little use, typically providing page filler examples of vulnerabilities and techniques that have been and gone or have offered little in the way of new information. This book however is bang up to date and teaches assessment techniques that will still be current for a long time to come.
If you're hoping to pursue a career in security, need the best reference available, or are trying to get to grips with the threats posed to your web application, you should buy this book.

At our organisation all of our technical staff have a copy and have all found it useful.

Good read
This book is quite thick but it covers just about any aspect of web application security that one could possibly imagine. It provides a very readable content without diving into too much technical detail. Rather than focusing on a single technology, it covers various web frameworks and their specific vulnerabilities. Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is the final chapter in which an excellent methodology checklist is provided which allows one to verify security of a given web application step by step. After having finished this book I came to realize how valuable awareness of security issues is to the long term success of a give web application which must not only perform well but remain robust and stable to any and all security attacks.

An Excellent Read!
If you have already purchased this book then you are in a very good way to find out truths and lies on Web Hacking. This book touches almost all topics that regard Web Application security and exploit methods. So far, along with Hacking Exposed, this book has been the perfect companion to me for threat identification (Risk Analysis), hardening and creating proper Security Architectures. Keep in mind that if you are into Security his book by itself is not enough. If you are into Web Applications though, this book is everything you need. Code Injections, Path Traversals, Session attacks, XSS are all hot and popular attack methods nowadays; all of them are thoroughly covered in this book's pages. 5 stars from me.